Mitch is not happy ...

Mitch is not happy. :) 

Pan's Labyrinth, a great film without question. 

Blood Moon 11/8/22

Closing in ...

Earth Light

 

The Umbra space

ST yet again ...

 

Getty; The Atlantic

ST, you know, the return to Standard Time at 2am, Sunday, November 6, is the time yours truly gets an hour of extra sleep, a totally opposite effect when DST goes into effect whereby the loss of said hour vis a vis sleep truly sucks in this rube's opinion. Back in 1974, a "permanent" DST was implemented and people hated it. Being an NYC denizen at the time, waking up in the dark was a total disaster so ... with congress thinking of going DST on a permanent basis, one has to think, will it be any different this time? 

A January 8, 1974, article in the Washington Post.

The sun rose at 8:27 AM on January 7, 1974. Children in the Washington area had left for school in the dark that morning, thanks to a new national experiment during a wrenching energy crisis: most of the US went to year-round daylight saving time beginning on January 6. “It was jet black” outside when her daughter was supposed to leave for school, Florence Bauer of Springfield told the Washington Post. “Some of the children took flashlights with them.”

Exactly.

So the question to ask is. why are we doing the clock dance as it messes with our circadian rhythms along with the joy of resetting clocks twice a year?

Circadian rhythm cycle of a typical teenager. Credit: NIGMS.

Have to admit, going back an hour has its benefits.

This weekend, I’ll be waking up to one of my favorite days of the year: a government-sanctioned 25-hour Sunday. Forget birthdays, forget my anniversary; heck, forget the magic of Christmas. On Sunday, I’ll get to do a bit of time traveling as most of the United States transitions out of daylight saving time back into glorious, glorious standard time.

But if we all put aside our differences for just a moment, we can celebrate the fact that this weekend, nearly all Americans—regardless of where they sit on the DST love-hate spectrum—will be blessed with a 25-hour day, and that freaking rocks. If we must live in a dumb world where the dumb clocks shift twice a dumb year, let’s at least come together on the objective greatness of falling back.

I'll drink to that and ... I'm a fan of ST as it works in concert with how life functions in the real world. 

A self-inflicted CF ...

Musk is a great engineer, at the level of a Kelly Johnson  but unlike Kelly, he knows not his limitations, especially in light of buying Twitter, a company having no real profit potential outside of trying to package gossip, innuendos and lies along the lines of an unfiltered Facebook, something Musk is promising to do at an even higher level as he believes in absolute freedom of speech even if it means falsely shouting Fire! in a Theater when testing the limits to free speech and individual rights in real time. Trump anyone?

To whit ...

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the specter of a man falsely

shouting “fire” in a theater into First Amendment law. Nearly one hundred years later,

this remains the most enduring analogy in constitutional law. It has been relied on in

hundreds of constitutional cases, and it has permeated popular discourse on the scope

of individual rights.

 A self-inflicted CF ...

You fucked up real good, kiddo.

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

Why? ...

I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

In essence ...

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Read the rest of The Verge's blurb if you dare. :)

Reading between the lines ...

History Buffs rules as facts about, in this case, Mozart, are truly astounding as vulgarity and social awkwardness to the max seamlessly connect to art of the sublime, something also seen with Michelangelo, DiVinci and Miles Davis, among significant others, as all three are flawed examples of humanity just as this rube is without question.

The art of cursive ...

A favorite movie of mine, Hugo, channels not only the visionary-genius of french filmmaker Georges Méliès but also delves into the mystery and wonder of the automaton, a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions.[1], able to do things like write like an angel, an essential skill sadly going away due to the rise of the computer.

It’s hard to imagine that before the United States of America even became a country, a Swiss watchmaker had already created a machine with the capabilities of a modern programmable computer– in the form of a small boy. The 70cm-tall automaton known as “The Writer”, is an extraordinary but often forgotten anomaly of its age. So impossibly ahead of its time, even the creator, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, was fearful he might be arrested for sorcery when he presented his masterpieces of engineering to the royal courts of Europe. The most complex of his self-moving androids is now nearly 250 years-old; a machine that simulates human actions without electricity, controlled by a complex programming system disk fitted inside the carved wooden body of an extraordinary little child. 

Okay, here’s where you geek out. In order to write any words, letter by letter over four lines, it uses an extraordinary system of 40 rotating cams that essentially work like a Read-only (ROM) data storage, mainly still used to store firmware or application software on computers today. The wheel controlling the cams inside the doll is a programming system disk made up of letters that can be removed, replaced and re-ordered to make any word or any sentence, allowing this 250-year old writer, to be programmed like a robot.

See Hugo and be enchanted. :)

Bell-ringing Death on Prague astronomical clock

Open the Aperture of Your Mind ...

Researcher Toy Reid sits before a timeline chronicling the lead-up to the pandemic at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington. Credit: Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair

Every once in a while, a conspiracy theory becomes credible like the one stating Covid19, in fact, escaped from a bio lab located in Wuhan, China, a dark possibility endlessly trumpeted by Agent Orange but dismissed by those "who" know, may be valid if a story detailing the problems besetting said lab are true.

To whit ...

Toy Reid has always had a gift for languages — one that would carry him far from what he calls his “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina. In high school, Spanish came easily. At nearby Furman University, where he became the first person in his family to attend college, he studied Japanese. Then, “clueless but curious,” as he puts it, he channeled his fascination with the Dalai Lama into a master’s degree in East Asian philosophy and religion at Harvard. Along the way, he picked up Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, and achieved fluency in Chinese.

But it was his career as a China specialist for the Rand Corporation and as a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department that taught him how to interpret a notoriously opaque language: the “party speak” practiced by Chinese Communist officials.

Channeling Orwell ...

For 15 months, Reid loaned this unusual skill to a nine-person team dedicated to investigating the mystery of COVID-19’s origins. Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

As Reid burrowed into the party branch dispatches, he became riveted by the unfolding picture. They described intense pressure to produce scientific breakthroughs that would elevate China’s standing on the world stage, despite a dire lack of essential resources. Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”

And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.

"These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace."

Dr. Robert Kadlec examines evidence assembled by the Senate researchers. 

Credit: Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair

“Open the Aperture of Your Mind”

More than two years after the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, the question of its origin has remained a scientific whodunit for the ages. Did the virus come from a caged infected animal, languishing in the warren of stalls at a Wuhan wholesale market? Or did it come from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, where China’s top coronavirus researchers, some partly funded by the U.S. government, were splicing together coronavirus strains to gauge how they might become most infectious to humans?

Channeling Agatha Christie ...

But what drew Reid’s full attention was the word Ji used to describe the important “written instructions” he was relaying from Beijing: “pishi.” When China’s senior leaders receive written reports on a worrying or important issue, they will write instructions in the margins, known as pishi, to be carried out swiftly by lower-level officials. As Reid interpreted it, the pishi that Ji arrived with that day appeared to have come directly from Xi, arguably China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. To Reid, it suggested that Xi himself had been briefed on an ongoing crisis at the WIV.

Opacity rules or in the end ...

"The WIV is under the thumb of the party state," says Toy Reid. "

American scientists have been slow to realize that."

Deja vu all over again ...

Ukrainian war, American flag.Photographer: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images

An image most telling indirectly shows the intimate relationship of Ukraine to the US in Ukraine's conflict with Russia, a possible start point to WWIII as the west is using Ukraine as proxy in its defacto war with Russia. Combine this specter of destruction with accelerating climate change and one sees a new dark age coming unless civilization withdraws from the abyss before it's too late. The only existential event compared to this conflict is the Missiles of October, when the world was also on the brink before pulling back in avoiding Armageddon. 

A large proportion of the world’s top tourist destinations are the remains of dead empires. A week of sightseeing with my younger children in Italy reminded me of this. The city of Rome was the capital of an empire that at its height stretched from Britannia to Babylonia. The city of Venice once ruled a realm that extended across what are now Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Montenegro and Slovenia.

The world today is dominated by two empires: the US, which originated in the British colonization of North America, and the ethnic-Han-dominated Middle Kingdom we call the People’s Republic of China. But a number of former empires continue to play disproportionate roles in world politics: The Russian empire limps on in the guise of the Russian Federation; the Persian empire is now the Islamic Republic of Iran; one might say the Holy Roman Empire has been reincarnated in the form of the European Union, at once extensive, German-centered and weak.

It is not civilizations that clash, but empires. Indeed, it is often border clashes that define their extents. As a schoolboy, I was taught the world wars as if they had been contests between European nation states. Only later did I see that they were struggles between empires. That was why they were global and not just European conflicts.

Empires fall. Two weeks ago, I optimistically suggested that I would live to see the fall of the empires of the Chinese Communists, the Russian fascists and the Iranian theocrats. But we must not make the mistake of assuming that the US is an indestructible empire, for there is no such thing. The Biden administration would not be the first Democratic administration elected on a progressive domestic program that stumbled into a major war: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Johnson — they all did it. The record is: won two, tied one, lost one.

When looking at war, only the very few profit. Read War is a Racket to see why this rings true. 

Everyone hates Ted

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Everyone hates Ted, I hate Ted, especially after his 2021 Cancun adventure while his fellow Texans were freezing their butts off but I digress. Let's listen to others who know Ted personally, which is all the reason more to detest this guy without reservation.

Senator Ted Cruz’s long career of narcissistically self-aggrandizing political stunts has won him few friends in politics. Actually, no friends.

These are the some of the most charitable remarks his fellow Republicans have said about him:

“I will never not hate Ted Cruz with a fiery passion,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. “Nothing he does or says could ever change the fact I’ve said before that if someone killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, no Senators would vote to convict the murderer. I’d even vote to confirm that person onto the Supreme Court because killing Cruz would exemplify such clear and sound judgment!”

This is about the best thing Graham has ever said without question. 

“Al Franken said it best when he said that he liked Ted Cruz more than most in the Senate, and that he hated Ted Cruz,” said Senator Ron Daniels. “Al Franken certainly liked Ted much more than I do! One time at a Republican caucus luncheon I saw Ted Cruz with spinach in his teeth, toilet paper stuck to his shoe, his pants zipper down, his shirt on inside-out, and a booger hanging from his nose… and I didn’t say a word to him about any of it!”

“I wish Ted Cruz would just stay in Cancun the next time he flies there during a Texan weather emergency,” said RNC spokeswoman Shelly Poitter. “I’d love it if the government would deport him to Mexico or Canada, except that releasing the bio weapon of mass annoyance that is Ted Cruz would likely be considered by those governments as an act of war.”

And last but not least ... :)

“The first moment I met Ted Cruz and he looked me in the eyes, I got my first hot flash of menopause,” said Senator Angela Lukeshire. “It’s like my body was so disgusted by his creepy, slimy, hair-raising presence that my ovaries did the menstrual equivalent of throwing up.”

Any questions? :)

A Faustian bargain ...

Stephanie Arentt/MITTR

For years, the concept of how drones will change warfare has now become fact, something most disquieting as autonomous AI, the engine driving this increasingly deadly technology, remains a black box due to the necessity of real time code having to react to realtime issues, something requiring code to rewrite code and not us as AI is open ended, able to evolve at speeds incomprehensible to us rubes, discomferting issues BRT has talked about for years. 

The US Navy wants swarms of thousands of small drones

Budget documents reveal plans for the Super Swarm project, a way to overwhelm defenses with vast numbers of drones attacking simultaneously.

The US Navy is working on ways to build, replay, and control thousands of small drones that re able to flock together to overwhelm anti-aircraft defenses with sheer numbers, budget documents reveal.

The conflict in Ukraine has proved the worth of small drones, including consumer quadcopter, which have carried out reconnaissance, guided artillery fire, and destroyed tanks. Such drones are currently limit by the fact that each one needs its own operator. In a swarm, however, hundreds or thousands of drones are controlled as a single unit.

The word assume yet again ...

"The significance of drone swarms is that they can be conceivably applied to virtually any mission," say Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at the Scha School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

Skynet looms ...

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